


In Pursuit of Wernher von Braun

by Frea_O



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Badass SHIELD Agents, F/M, Gen, Redemption, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, odd couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-18
Updated: 2013-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-29 19:39:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1009255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frea_O/pseuds/Frea_O
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a fire in a morgue leads to some surprising news, the interests of Pepper Potts and SHIELD might be temporarily aligned. Or, the story in which Pepper Potts, Maria Hill, and Natasha Romanoff agree to team up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Pursuit of Wernher von Braun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rmc28](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rmc28/gifts).



> Hey, **rmc28**! So...I really wanted to write you an entire story of Natasha and Pepper being badass together and slaying everything in their path, leaving Maria to clean up the bodies, but real life got in the way and I met my nemesis, which is a flu shot that knocked me off of my feet. So all I could do is write the first bit of that story, but I _will_ have more of this series ( _Maria Hill and the Disdainful Redhead Coalition_ because that name amuses me to no end) up very shortly!

Natasha was halfway through a chocolate muffin when the tray clattered down across the table. It only took one glance at the line of Maria Hill’s shoulders to know this wasn’t a social call, but instead of launching into business, as the Deputy Director was wont to do, Maria merely grunted a hello and bent over her omelet with gusto.

“Good morning to you, too,” Natasha said, picking up a coffee from the tray, as Maria had seen fit to bring two. She didn’t know who had come up with the idea of bringing a bribe when approaching the Widow, but Natasha wasn’t going to correct any social behavior that led to free coffee. “Have a good time training?”

Maria pulled a face.

“Taking that as a no.”

“Barton is a slave-driver when he runs PT.”

“Why do you think I’m eating this muffin and not anywhere near the gym?” Natasha added more sugar to the coffee.

“You’re worse, but don’t tell Barton I said so. He doesn’t have anything to prove. And neither, for the record, do you.”

Natasha smiled.

Maria finished her omelet. “You on good terms with Pepper Potts?”

“As good as can be expected, given that I infiltrated her company solely to spy on her and her boyfriend. When you add in that I used the ‘feminine wiles’ card and I’m fairly certain I didn’t tell her a single truth the entire time I was there…”

“Oh, is that all?” Maria’s lips quirked up.

Natasha contemplated the coffee. “For some, it is enough.”

“And for Miss Potts?”

“I think she found me to be—she’s a nerd, Hill, every bit as much as that helmet-head she’s dating is.”

“They moved in together, you know.” Omelet decimated, Maria moved on to the grapefruit.

“Before or after the house was destroyed?”

“Before. And what do you mean, she’s a nerd?”

“Exactly what I said. She’s a nerd like Stark, except she’s fascinated by people, not science projects.” Because she wanted to scowl, Natasha leaned her elbows on the table. “She found me interesting. There was no need to burn that bridge, not after I helped her and Stark take down Hammer and Vanko. But I also doubt she’s going to invite me over for brunch anytime soon.”

“Pity,” Maria said.

“Is this something to do with the Extremis?”

“There’s been some developments and we think she might want to get involved since Stark’s benched himself.”

Natasha tilted her head slightly, contemplating the possibilities. Tony Stark was still recovering from open heart surgery, which didn’t distress Fury nearly as much as the fact that he had destroyed all of his suits. Because she was Level Seven, Natasha had been briefed about the Mandarin operation, as they were calling it in headquarters now, so she knew exactly what had happened to the redheaded CEO after she had been kidnapped by AIM. Stark had reportedly stabilized the Extremis so that Pepper wouldn’t explode, but that didn’t mean she wanted to get anywhere near that burning pile of trouble, though.

From the look on Maria’s face, though, it didn’t seem Natasha had a choice.

“So,” Natasha said. “I guess I should dust off Natalie Rushman’s heels and see if they still fit.”

“Might want to dress a tad more practically than that, Romanoff.” Maria tilted an eyebrow as she rose, picking up her tray and the other coffee. “You’ve faced down one scientist turned into a horrible, terrifying rage monster. Ready to do it again?”

“If we’re being honest: not really.”

“Oh, c’mon,” Maria said, her smile a little crooked. “It’ll be fun.”

Natasha very much doubted that.

* * *

“You realize that I had open heart surgery two weeks ago. Two weeks. That’s less than a month, as in, not that long.”

“You healed up within forty-eight hours,” Pepper said, side-stepping Tony so that she could fit the last of her clothing into the suitcase. The agent—Phil’s replacement, which hurt—that had contacted her had said to wear clothes unlike those she preferred as a CEO, which meant that her first excursion with SHIELD was going to be very different from everything she was used to, even with Tony around. “Playing the sympathy card only works so well when you have magic—”

“Science. I strenuously object to that word—”

“To fix you,” Pepper finished. “And if you object to magic, how do you explain the demigod summoning actual lightning from the Chrysler Building?”

Tony’s face didn’t quite light up, but it did take on that particular slant to his lips and the gleam in his eye that preceded a scientific lecture. And Pepper was running late.

“On second thought, don’t answer that,” she said.

“I have theories, you know,” Tony said, getting in her way again. When she put her hand on his chest to push him back, it made her jolt like it always did because the arc reactor wasn’t there. Tony seemed to notice, for he gave that smug little head-tilt he thought made him look sexy (it did, but Pepper was hardly going to tell him that). “Several viable theories that I have vetted with very important people.”

“By which you mean Bruce,” Pepper said.

“And JARVIS.”

“Oh, well, that’s okay, then.” Pepper smiled. “No offense, JARVIS.”

“I assure you, there is none taken, Miss Potts.”

Pepper nudged Tony back so that she could fit in her toiletries kit. Traveling as much as she had meant she was usually able to put together a suitcase—one for him, one for her—in less than ten minutes, but with Tony following her around like a sulky puppy, he more than quadrupled the time. “You’re making me late.”

“Obviously.”

“Why?”

“Because if you’re late enough, you won’t go. It’s SHIELD. Since when have we liked SHIELD?”

“You’re jealous because they picked me and not you.” Pepper opened her jewelry case and selected two or three of her more demure pieces. Something out of the corner of her eye made her whip about, and she caught the look on Tony’s face before he could mask it. “You are! You’re jealous.”

“I am totally…so jealous, yes,” Tony said. “Last time SHIELD called me up, I got to fix a flying aircraft carrier in midair.”

“While it was falling out of the sky,” Pepper said. “With people on board that were close to dying.”

“We saved ’em. Besides, you can’t leave now. I feel like I’m finally getting to the point where I can get some things off of my chest—wow, ha, pun unintended. That was a good one, I should remember that one.”

Pepper sighed at him and zipped up her suitcase.

“Did they even say how long you were going to be away?”

“Hopefully for less than a couple of days. I go away all the time for the company, I don’t know why you see this as any different.”

Tony grabbed her suitcase and she let him because she knew the Extremis—which sent a chill through her to even think about it, but the nightmares were beginning to fade—had worked after his surgery. “You’re a hundred percent less likely to run into Grumpy Eye-Patch in a Leather Trench Coat while on a business trip than you are working for SHIELD.”

They entered the main foyer. “I’m not working for them, I’m a consultant, and I still think you’re exaggerating about this Fury character.”

“He’s not,” said a new voice. Pepper didn’t bother to react. Thanks to the Extremis, she’d heard Bruce Banner enter the apartment. The redhead beside him, though, she hadn’t heard at all. Bruce fiddled with his hands like he always did, but Natalie—Natasha, her name was Natasha—seemed at ease, her arms casually crossed over her chest. “That’s exactly how I would describe Nick Fury,” Bruce continued.

Natasha smiled a little. “Not to his face, maybe.”

It wasn’t Pepper’s imagination that Bruce smiled back. “Maybe. Depends on how I’m feeling. Hey, Tony. Pepper, you look amazing.”

“Thank you, Bruce.” Pepper gave him a kiss on the cheek in greeting, as she was rather fond of him. He shuffled like he always did.

Tony squinted at both of them and then at Natasha. “I don’t recall inviting you.”

“You didn’t. I’m here on SHIELD business.”

Pepper’s eyebrows shot up. When the agent had said a liaison would be coming to meet her, she had not expected that said agent would be her ex-assistant.

Natasha tilted her head in concession. “Ready to go, Miss Potts?”

“Just a moment.”

The redhead nodded politely. She walked away so soundlessly that even Pepper’s enhanced hearing didn’t pick up the sound of her footsteps.

Once she was gone, Pepper turned to Tony. “Bruce has agreed to come here and—”

“Be my nanny?”

“Hang out with you while I’m away so you can do science-y stuff together,” Pepper said, giving him an unimpressed look even though she kind of had to agree that she’d called Bruce for precisely that reason. “You behave.”

“If I must,” Tony said with a long-suffering sigh, and his hands certainly didn’t behave when he kissed her good-bye. “I make no promises, though.”

“I figured.”

With a wave to Bruce (who was studiously looking at the ceiling), Pepper walked off to join Natasha in the hallway. As she left, she heard Tony say, “Oh, good, I’ve been needing a doctor for a while. We’ve got a lot to talk about, Doc. Let’s skip the cave in Afghanistan, I feel like that story’s already told…”

Bruce, Pepper saw, was in for an interesting couple of days.

* * *

They could have briefed Pepper at Stark Tower, but it meant running the risk of getting Tony Stark involved, and Maria had decided early on that that was unacceptable. Stark was a wildcard—albeit a damned talented one—and things had a habit of exploding around him. Maria wanted as little to blow up on this mission as she possibly could.

The driver dropped Pepper and Natasha off in front of the building, and Maria couldn’t tell by either of their expressions how the reunion had gone.

“Pepper Potts?” she asked, though she’d read the dossier on the woman in front of her at least four times. Extremis enhancements, Ivy League education, an IQ higher than most of SHIELD, and CEO to a top ten company. If Maria were the type to be daunted by sheer and impressive competence, she might have gawked at Pepper Potts. She held out a hand to shake. “I’m Agent Maria Hill. This is my op.”

“A pleasure to meet you.” They shook hands. “Sorry the weather couldn’t be better.”

“Don’t worry. It’s sunny in Florida,” Natasha said, coming around the car with Pepper’s bag. Apparently she’d had time to sneak a look at Maria’s flight plan. Maria wasn’t surprised.

Pepper raised an eyebrow. “Florida? I was expecting something more…foreign.”

“We’ll talk on the jet,” Maria said, eyeing the doorman. She saw Natasha’s amused scoff at her paranoia and chose to ignore it. She wasn’t used to being the Agent In Charge in the field. She always fell into the job of infantry or the voice calling the shots from headquarters, but with the Helicarrier under repair and SHIELD in a state of flux, Fury was scattering the chain of command across the planet, letting them get time in the field. Maria wasn’t sure she agreed, especially since she was now on a team with a biogenetically engineered super-spy and a biogenetically engineered CEO, about to face off against a biogenetically engineered scientist. Given that the last time that had happened, her beloved Helicarrier had nearly crashed into the earth, Maria didn’t feel she was being too radical in having her reservations about this op.

And then there was the fact that Natasha Romanoff didn’t even need an AIC.

If she was bothered, Natasha hadn’t let it show during the flight to New York. Nor did her expression change now, as they rode the elevator up together and hurried through the sleet to the Quinjet.

Maria stopped in the cockpit only long enough to power up the heat and computer systems while Natasha and Pepper chose seats in the bay. “Now that we’re all here,” she said, queuing up the mission notes she’d made, “I can reveal what this is about.”

“I wager it’s not world domination,” Natasha said. Maria blinked at her. “One of these days, it will be. And Barton will be vindicated.”

“As ever, I’m going to ignore Barton’s ideas for what makes an acceptable mission.”

“I don’t mean to interrupt, ah, world domination,” Pepper said, “but I don’t see why you would need somebody like me. Despite…what is inside me, I am very much not cut out for martial operations like I know SHELD runs.”

Maria noted the hesitation to call Extremis by its name, though she had to respect the forthright look Pepper gave her. “SHIELD felt you might be interested in the outcome of this op,” she said.

“And why is that?” Pepper asked.

“Two days ago, the main medical examiner’s office in Miami-Dade County burned to the ground. No casualties, though evidence for ongoing investigations was lost.” Maria called up pictures of the carnage onto the holo-screen. Pepper looked horrified at the sight of that many burned-out bodies, but Natasha just looked grim. “Normally that’s not something we would handle—I’d leave it to a team I’m putting together, actually—but take a look at this.”

She called up the photos she’d had a tech pull off of the coroner’s server. There were no autopsy photos—the medical’s office had been back-logged—but there were pictures taken at the crime scene. Pepper’s look grew even more horrified.

“The body of Dr. Maya Hansen was one of the corpses stored at this office before it burned to the ground,” Maria said. “She was not, however, listed among the bodies recovered from the fire.”

“Still?” Natasha asked.

It was a valid question; it had been nearly two months since Nick Fury had called Maria and told her that the President of the United States had been kidnapped and held in a shipping yard. “They were backlogged,” she said. “Not everybody has our resources.”

“Why wasn’t Dr. Hansen’s body taken in by SHIELD?” Natasha asked.

“Given the publicity surrounding the Mandarin debacle, we needed to let other agencies play more than usual.” Maria wanted to sigh; she’d disagreed with Fury’s call with everything having to do with the Mandarin, but SHIELD had been rather busy stopping a pathogen from getting out and destroying most of South America that week. “We agreed to let local authorities handle any bodies not dosed with Extremis. Based on Stark’s statements about what happened at the Mandarin’s estate in Miami and the fact that there have been two months without activity, we had no reason to suspect that Hansen was not among that number.”

“Tony told me Ma—Dr. Hansen was shot before she could inject herself,” Pepper said. “How is this possible?”

“Stark neglected to mention that after being shot, she wasn’t in his line of sight.” Maria took a deep breath—this was why she hated bringing in civilians—before she pulled up the security footage they’d confiscated from the Mandarin estate. Indeed, Pepper flinched again, for the screen showed a triangle of Aldrich Killian, Maya Hansen, and Tony Stark, who was chained to an upright bedframe. Maria sped it up so that Killian shot Hansen at double-speed, and the scientist fell behind a work-table.

Natasha tapped the screen to pause and zoom in. “Any other angles?”

“That’s the only one,” Maria said.

“So we have no idea if she had time to dose herself. Gut shot like that, I’m going to guess death wasn’t instantaneous.”

“Stark claimed the dose she held was enough to kill her.”

“So. Somebody took the body and started a fire to cover it up?” Natasha asked. “Is there a new player in the Extremis game?”

“Potentially, but…” Maria pressed a button and an ATM surveillance video filled the screen. The timestamp in the corner marked it as 02:13:46 a.m., which explained the darkness and lack of movement on the residential street beyond. A figure wrapped in a blanket stumbled by, moving erratically. Rather, Maria thought, like somebody who had been in a stupor for a very long time and who had just woken out of it.

The video froze as Maya Hansen turned her head and looked directly at the camera. There was a distinctly orange glow to her cheeks and a glint in her eyes that Maria recognized from all of the security footage surrounding the president’s kidnapping. It made her want to shudder.

It made Pepper sit down, hard. No matter how much anybody pressed, Maria would never admit that in that moment, she searched for any sign of redness around Pepper’s cheeks or hands.

“She looks pretty good for somebody who’s been dead two months,” Natasha said, and Maria wondered at the ironic twist to her voice. The Black Widow had reportedly died for years at a time.

“She dosed herself,” Pepper said, tendons along her neck standing out. “She dosed herself, and survived, and then she set that morgue on fire and walked out.”

“We don’t know for sure exactly what happened. We do know that there wasn’t a recorded temperature spike similar to the other Extremis misfires, but given that we didn’t realize the significance of this event until after forty-eight hours had passed, she’s got two-day lead on us. And the trail has gone cold.”

“Ironic,” Natasha said. “When was this captured in relation to the fire?”

“About an hour afterward. Footage from the morgue was lost, and the night staff don’t remember seeing anything strange, like one of their bodies rising from the dead,” Maria said.

“You’d definitely remember that,” Natasha said, and her tone stated that there was clearly a story behind her words. Maria decided not to press.

“We’ve been tasked by SHIELD to either bring Dr. Maya Hansen in or…” Maria paused and tried to search for the proper words.

Natasha seemed to understand the hesitation, for the agent fell silent. It was Pepper, who was a little glassy-eyed but nowhere near an Extremis episode that they all feared though, that looked at Maria. “Or?” she asked.

“Or we eliminate the threat,” Maria said.

Pepper bit her lower lip and slowly looked down at her hands. “I think I just figured out why you needed somebody like me on your team.”

“No, that’s what Natasha’s there for,” Maria said, and Natasha snorted, but didn’t deny it.

“And my job on this team?”

“We thought you’d want some closure. I’ve set up a flight plan for Miami. We have our mission objectives. I’ll let you two research and see what you can find before we hit the ground in Florida.” Maria flicked a finger to send the files to the consoles in front of the other two women and climbed into the cockpit. As she powered up the Quinjet’s boosters, which had been developed by Howard Stark back in the earliest days of SHIELD, she couldn’t help but wonder if SHIELD wasn’t making a huge mistake putting this team together.

It was a feeling she’d had quite often in the past year.


End file.
